MAXXI celebrates the past looking forward to the future

The Roman museum dedicated to the 21st-century art marks its 10th birthday with a rich program for 2020

The National Museum of XXI Century Art, better known as MAXXI, opened in 2010 as the first Italian institution dedicated to contemporary art. A huge former Roman barracks, in the Flaminio district, was redesigned by Zaha Hadid (1950-2016). And the location became a museum, a platform open to all the languages of creativity.

Over the last decade, MAXXI welcomed over 3,000,000 visitors, with the annual number of visitors in 2019 more than double the one of 2010. It presented 106 exhibitions, over 2,000 cultural events, and more than 5,000 educational and training activities, with tickets generating €12.7 million. Even if admission to the permanent collection is free days a week. This includes a corpus of 530 works.

There are installations by Bill Fontana, Katharina Grosse, Sol Lewitt, and Maurizio Mochetti; as well as works by Alighiero Boetti, Giulio Turcato, Francesco Clemente, William Kentridge, Mario and Marisa Mertz, Tomas Saraceno, Giuseppe Penone, and Maria Lai.

For 2020, MAXXI announced a rich program including 18 new exhibitions.

Among them, from April 9: ‘Landscapes in Italian art at the turn of the millennium’; an exhibition dedicated to architect Aldo Rossi; and a tribute to scholar and gallery owner Claudia Gian Ferrari. Moreover, on June 21st, a new MAXXI museum will open in L’Aquila, the earthquake-hit capital of the Abruzzo region. Its location is the city’s historic center, in the beautiful and restored Palazzo Ardinghelli.

The site-specific works entrusted in 2015 to five important Italian artists will be immediately visible in the new Abruzzo outpost. The authors are Elisabetta Benassi, Daniela De Lorenzo, Alberto Garutti and late Ettore Spalletti. The Maxxi collection will house works by Liliana Moro, Maurizio Nannucci, Enzo Cucchi, Maurizio Cattelan, Piero Manzoni, Rudolph Stingel, Bruna Esposito, Philippe Rahm, Francois Roche, Toyo Ito, Sergio Musmeci, Sol LeWitt, and Then & Calzadilla.